POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Good Times. Russell Baker. William Morrow, $19.95. Russell Baker's latest memoir takes him from apprenticeship as police reporter at the Baltimore Sun to elevation, at...
...But they all have also been embittered by their experience...
...With our markets and our military umbrella, we have considerable leverage over Japan, and van Wolferen's invaluable book shows us just how and where we should use it...
...Instead it shows by accretion of historical detail what happens to navies that, faced with a choice in technology, choose wrong...
...Peter Grier A Gathering at the River...
...The first and last great confrontation of dreadnoughts, Jutland brought home the fact that technology had accelerated, that navies were vulnerable to defeat "in an afternoon" if found deficient in armor, gunnery, or flash protection...
...he said it wasn't such an emergency that it needed to be fixed on a Sunday night and that he'd be in the next morning . " As a result, the boy spends an excruciatingly painful night and may have damaged his new kidney...
...Other states, including California and Massachusetts, are also considering regulating intern and resident hours...
...Politicians like Richard Gephardt will love this book: By casting Japan as a national economic conspiracy, it makes the case for U.S...
...But as van Wolferen himself makes clear, the United States can exert considerable pressure on Japan to change its ways without resorting to out-and-out protectionism...
...But Keegan sees subs as the capital ships of the future, for the simple reason that full freedom of the seas, both above and below, rests only with them...
...How many tricks are tucked away in the budget process...
...But implicit in that judgment, and throughout van Wolferen's book, is the idea that such overarching values are the be-all of Western civilization, playing far more of a part in the daily life, say, of an average American than an average Japanese...
...Fire raced down towards the magazines...
...A little after 7:30 a.m., the Zions received a call from the hospital...
...the Times, recognizing it was about to lose an enormous talent, called and raised the Sun's bid by offering Baker the "Observer" column, which he writes to this day...
...He had such bad assignments, Personnel must have had him on a special list...
...In the early fifties, London hadn't yet become the completely pointless finishing school for newspaper reporters it is today...
...Since the Prince wasn't very good with numbers, he turned the management of the account over to Snow...
...Gangsters call a truce when they realize turf wars are hurting their city's image...
...Libby Zion was admitted to the hospital late at night with symptoms of fever and agitation...
...sub fleet is small...
...By peeling back layers of romanticism and dogma to expose what really happens in naval war, Keegan's book shows the roots of many of today's naval problems...
...He was the one who could always tell you what was really going on...
...Of course they never did...
...Presiding over all this is a network of government ministries, corporate conglomerates, elected politicians, and other groups that function as competing semiautonomous components, with no ultimate authority at their head...
...Their capital ships had antiflash protection, and while Jutland was perhaps a strategic German defeat, the exchange of big ships was three to one in their favor...
...We have come a long way from the days when the only important distinction was between authorizations (a vague commitment to spend money) and appropriations (actually empowering agencies to write checks...
...Moreover, for all van Wolferen's insistence on the primacy of politics over culture, his explanations still tend to make Japanese life seem inscrutable and unique—no less so than the cultural explanations he dismisses at the outset...
...That kind of thinking is fine with the locals...
...The result is a book that is even more likable than its predecessor, Growing Up...
...Given the narrative and reportorial powers on display in Growing Up and The Good Times, one can't help wondering what Baker might have accomplished had he remained in harness as journalism's rules were easing up...
...Even Marion himself draws the line at identifying the hospital where he works...
...Elizabeth Stark The Guide to the Federal Budget: Fiscal 1990...
...In every case, if there was local color to be found, Godsey's creative memory paints a picture of it...
...As time went on, the budget projections meant less and less...
...Yet the U.S...
...The U.S...
...In similar fashion, when van Wolferen describes Japan's main pork-barrel enterprise, the public works industry, he doesn't seem to register the strong parallels with American practices...
...And although it may seem extreme that a Japanese maternity hospital would run ads guaranteeing admittance to prestigious kindergartens as part of a delivery package, yuppie couples in the United States would probably leap at the offer...
...At the time of the Battle of Jutland, all Britain's capital ships had the same flaw: insufficient "antiflash" doors for preventing fire from racing through turrets and magazines...
...It all started when the Prince and his wife, Snow White-Prince, decided to get their first joint checking account...
...Knopf, $24.95...
...Iowa that killed 47 men...
...Navy might well have turned the tide against the Japanese in the Pacific much earlier if its submarines had not been stocked with torpedoes that misfired at catastrophic rates...
...In fact if past history is any guide, Takeshita—who has refused to give up his parliamentary seat—is likely to retain considerable political power...
...In that respect Karel van Wolferen's book is likely to make any Japanese who reads it very uncomfortable...
...Libby Zion was the daughter of Sidney Zion, a lawyer and occasional writer for The New York Times, who had lots of friends in high places...
...Work weeks average 100 hours or more...
...His study of how power is exercised in Japan does more to explain the roots of the "Japan problem" than the work of legions of anthropologists, journalists, and political scientists before him...
...Timothy Noah The Price of Admiralty...
...This cost him scoops but spared him the straitjacket of "access . " Nor did Baker become Bill Lawrence, who derailed a successful career as a political reporter by becoming too obviously close to John F. Kennedy—a cautionary tale Baker relates with clear-eyed compassion...
...It was a good book—and very readable...
...In my nine years of overseas postings, I found bar-hopping with other Americans was often as local as most staffers got...
...Lately the silver bullet crowd has had the upper hand...
...In fact, Baker shows, it's a largely stenographic job...
...In another incident, when a young child dies, the stricken family's physician never shows up, and an intern they barely know has to break the news to them...
...on May 31, 1916, during the Battle of Jutland, one of the main gun turrets of the British battlecruiser Lion was hit by a 12-inch German shell...
...Since Grumpy didn't have enough gold ore to meet the minimum balance for an interest-bearing account, Snow and the Prince made him a signatory to their own account...
...But it's not clear these features make the Japanese way of governing very different from ours...
...But the process was still a fairy tale...
...Andy falls asleep four times while interviewing a mother who has brought her sick child to the emergency room...
...She didn't care what they each bought, so long as their projected expenditures came in under her allotments...
...Like many other faceless State Department employees, Godsey just did his job, quietly making the paperwork flow...
...Fred Godsey...
...But when the boxes were opened by Customs on arrival, instead of the expected trinkets, inspectors found hundreds of opium pipes and pornographic carvings...
...It's not just professional fears...
...And since Snow hated to disappoint all those cute little miners, she more than once made her income estimates way too optimistic...
...If I think about what's happening to me, I'll start to cry, and once I start crying, I don't think I'll be able to stop . " Soon the interns begin to resent their patients, whom they see as an impediment to home and sleep...
...Admiral Nelson successfully flouted this conception by sending his ships plunging into holes in the French and Spanish lines...
...Keegan points out that the previously installed protective devices had been removed by crews "to achieve the highest possible rates of fire in gunnery competitions . " German warships were better protected...
...Sometimes I wonder...
...In her rush to get home to her baby, Amy neglects to request a blood test...
...But this book indicates that he was different from his peers in the most important way...
...A few days later, the Post ran a front-page story about strict discipline in Japanese schools that expressed veiled shock about a student being slapped for bringing a hair dryer to school...
...And with the introduction of reconciliation, sequestration, and impoundment, the budget process begins to resemble, more than anything else, a bad fairy tale of big government run amok...
...The days of the company man may be over in the United States, but they shouldn't seem entirely alien and conspiratorial...
...Instead, he writes about these years with utterly convincing self-effacement...
...None of the patients described in this book dies as a result of a tired intern's negligence...
...Stanley E. Collender...
...Robert Marion...
...The fortress of medical education was dealt a severe blow with the death of an 18-year-old Bennington student at New York Hospital in 1984...
...It is a testament to the medical profession's subtle, but powerful, system of rewards and punishments that the entire book is cloaked in anonymity...
...Labor unions notify management beforehand about when and where they will stage demonstrations...
...For the unfortunates inside, it was as if their world had been fired by lightning...
...It is now also generally recognized that cuts must be discussed against the background of "baseline" budgets—that is, budgets adjusted upward for inflation...
...They've become apathetic and have, to a frightening degree, withdrawn from contact with the outside world...
...But in light of awful episodes like these, the solution isn't very hard to figure out: senior doctors should share the burden...
...Mark passes out from exhaustion while taking blood from a child...
...Even when a reporter got the inside line from a powerful aide, the result would commonly be "anecdotes illustrating the president's firmness, decisiveness, energy, alertness, glowing good health, zest for living, and a thousand other gee-whiz qualities . " (Sound familiar...
...You may wonder how van Wolferen, a Dutch journalist, could spend 15 years in a country that bothered him so much, but you won't regret that he did...
...But it seemed to me there was always at least one guy, probably somewhere down in the bowels of the visa or passport section, who just loved to hang out at the local hole-inthewall instead of the Marriott...
...when he visited London, Baker made sure to pick him up in a Daimler, the type of car Queen Mary rode in...
...There was a $100 billion annual deficit, a $1 trillion total deficit, and it took a 179-page book by a Director of Federal Budget Policy for Price Waterhouse just to explain how the whole system worked...
...The result is not so much a portrait of men at war as a study of change and counter-change...
...When each went over his limit, Snow had to take the proposed expenditures and cut them back until they matched revenues...
...Who needs another book of memoirs from Paris...
...Pretty soon, strange and wonderful numbers began to show up in the "income" column—like the sale of the castle, which of course never took place...
...Four months into the internship, overwhelmed by chronic exhaustion and immersion in death and disease, all three are displaying serious symptoms of depression...
...Godsey's yarns range across the planet, from the dank and musty backwaters of 1940s Brazil to the rundown bars of Asuncion, Paraguay...
...Today some experts complain that U.S...
...It's the seamy side of the world, where saints seldom win...
...It's well known that the worst part of a young doctor's ordeal is the internship—the first year out of medical school when he or she is sent to a teaching hospital...
...This includes an episode where Godsey's autobiographical character plots to kill a secret police agent who murdered a woman the real Godsey loved...
...But now that they're gone, Congress (not unlike the Diet after Recruit), is ready to put the issue of ethics behind it—and resume life with a 98 percent incumbency rate, honoraria, and PAC money...
...Lion was thus luckier than its sister, Invincible, which blew into halves when one of its gun turrets was hit shortly thereafter...
...Sound familiar...
...Considering Baker edged out future Times editor Abe Rosenthal (who wanted to write a column about Asia), Baker could be forgiven were he to display any retrospective smugness about his rapid rise...
...In the aftermath of World War II, the aircraft carrier came to dominate the U.S...
...Nicholas Martin The Enigma of Japanese Power...
...In his classic, Face of Battle, due for reissue soon in an illustrated edition, he took a series of land battles, beginning with Agincourt, and examined them to determine what men who experienced them must have gone through...
...schools—it's the test...
...Indeed, in his conclusion to Face of Battle, Keegan theorized that modern land combat would be so horrible that men would simply refuse to fight...
...At 4:00 p.m...
...Within a few years, the rise of the New Journalism created a niche for novelistic talents like Baker's, and in the years since, the possibilities for reporters to explore the significance of daily events have expanded further...
...Although Russell never had a chance to meet Cousin Edwin, his pompous figure loomed large in the family...
...James Gibney...
...After butting heads with a number of Burmese customs, the rather straight-laced delegation concluded a deal and headed for home...
...In Japan, the buck keeps circulating . " A classic case of the circulating Japanese buck is the Recruit bribery scandal...
...It will then meet with all the other nominated contractors for a negotiating session, called dango, at which it is decided which of them will get the job . . . The dango system ensures that all participating contractors get to work on a government project at one time or another . " What van Wolferen doesn't seem to get is that by changing just a few words, that passage could easily describe the birth of the B-1 bomber...
...They always believed it when the message from State Department Personnel was passed down saying, "Come quickly, we have an assignment for you we think you're going to like...
...By contrast, he judges conventional surface ships as "marginalized" instruments of military force...
...Quite a few, it seems, after reading Collender's instructive book...
...For all their talk about the need for greater outside "understanding" of Japan, most Japanese instinctively feel that the less we know about them, the better...
...Or Belem...
...His lesson is that real military preparedness often revolves around mundane items and activities...
...Sure Fred Godsey knew what he was doing...
...Now when Dopey wanted to buy a new pickax on credit, she'd authorize $100 for the pickax and appropriate $20 each year for five years to make the payments on it...
...Robert Marion, a pediatric geneticist, shares the belief that internship is a grueling and perilous ritual...
...The members' intent was to buy handicrafts for sale in the States...
...Either he is too nice a guy, or he knew what he was doing...
...It's also worries about what a 100-hour work week is going to do to their lives...
...If each of the more experienced attending physicians would spend a couple of long days and nights a year at the hospitals that give them privileges, the problems detailed in this book would be eased immediately...
...Later, when Baker covered the Senate for the Times, he wisely avoided getting too cozy with majority leader Lyndon Johnson...
...That gave Grumpy limited budget authority— he deposited his money, but when he wanted to make a withdrawal, he had to check it with Snow and the Prince...
...Big-city newspaper reporters may be well-paid today, but when Baker signed up with the Sun in 1947, "newspaper work was for life's losers . " Starting salary was a miserable $30 a week...
...Throughout Japanese history, any idea or force that threatened to disrupt the natural order of things was either crushed (like Christianity in the 16th century) or neutralized (like many American democratic reforms during the Occupation...
...fleet...
...torpedoes can't dive deep enough or move fast enough to catch many Soviet submarines...
...The other dwarves knew a good thing when they saw it, and soon there were six more names on the checks...
...In Keegan's book, naval warfare seems a uniquely technology-dependent type of combat, with new generations of machines completely transforming the rules...
...I think Godsey must have been one of the gullible ones...
...None of them believes he or she is ready for the huge new responsibility...
...Several weeks ago, The Washington Post ran a story about a young boy being killed by a classmate who wanted his expensive basketball sneakers...
...While we may rebel at the Japanese school's strictness, it's implausible to think that it doesn't represent a belief in some sort of transcendent value, one flagrantly absent in a society where you can get blown away for your Reeboks...
...It was a noble gesture made with the idea of both supporting peasant craftsmen in Burma and raising money for the church in America...
...Sort of the "Save for Fred Godsey" list...
...One editor went so far as to always request House of Lords gin for his martinis...
...The arguments against carriers are by now op-ed cliches—too much of their strength is spent defending themselves, they're vulnerable to cheap smart missiles, etc., etc...
...Restricting access to legal recourse is just one of many ways in which "the System," as van Wolferen calls the powers that control Japan, keeps the people in line...
...The lesson that turrets are a battleship's most vulnerable points has been brought home again to the U.S...
...While his pals back home were earning starvation wages, Baker, like all foreign correspondents, was expected to travel first-class and run up enormous expense accounts to demonstrate his sophistication...
...As van Wolferen says, "There is no place where, as Harry Truman would have said, the buck stops...
...But Baker ended up making his biggest splash with a piece about Queen Elizabeth's 1953 coronation— "just another color story," Baker admits...
...Clearly, the difference isn't the testtakers— Japanese students have typically excelled at rote learning in U.S...
...Especially in this television age, covering the White House is often viewed as journalism's big brass ring...
...One Sun writer broke a belt and couldn't afford a new one, so he came to work with a necktie around his waist...
...One reason Westerners know so little about the way Japan works is that few of them can stand to live there for long...
...As a result of those recommendations, New York State has enacted regulations, going into effect right now, that limit the hours interns and residents can work...
...consultant who opened an interview in Tokyo by telling me that American companies should send their best people to Japan and closed it by saying he couldn't wait to leave...
...This is an excellent guide to the Japanese polity...
...Almost 10 years after leaving office, Tanaka suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated, thereby threatening everything from the stability of the government then in power to various public works projects in rural prefectures...
...one, as he died, involuntarily switched on the loading hoist and sent burning cordite into the turret's depths...
...protectionism look good...
...It's notable that Price of Admiralty recycles none of these points...
...Exposed to the nonhysterical prose style of the Manchester Guardian (with whom the Sun shared an office), Baker purged his copy of journalistic cliches like "tense world capital" and "behind closed doors" and developed the gently ironic, unaffected voice that graces his columns today...
...And for once we had someone there to jot them down...
...This last period of internship has turned me into a very selfish and self-centered person," admits Andy, the most sensitive of the trio...
...Sometimes the closest thing to honest reporting you'd find was a rehash of the local papers, done over morning coffee in embassy offices...
...For too long, we've allowed the Japanese to hide behind former ambassador Mike Mansfield's statement that "the U.S.Japanese relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none . " The way to persuade Japan to play a more constructive economic role in the world, and to assume some of the burden of its own defense, is to stop doing so much for them...
...Then there's the Army's famous reluctance at the start of the Vietnam war to abandon the heavy and hard-to-control M-14 rifle, and its subsequent perversion of a viable preexisting design of a light, reliable one...
...Not only do we absorb roughly 40 percent of Japan's exports but we guarantee its military security and, by setting the terms of Japan's foreign policy, frequently shield it from diplomatic difficulties...
...The greatest benefit of Baker's London experience was not what he covered but what he read...
...Although obviously a gain for Baker and for readers of the Times's editorial pages, Baker's departure was a loss to the world of fact journalism...
...He tosses in a few stories of communist brutality in Cold War Hungary...
...For a construction firm to be allowed to bid on a public works project," he observes, "it must first bribe a powerful politician...
...Another is the quality of torpedoes...
...The turnover compromised the Sun's objectivity, but allowed Baker to move quickly up the paper's ladder from police reporter to feature writer to chief of the London bureau...
...Until such measures are adopted, however, the prudent reader will think twice before ever again admitting himself into a teaching hospital in July, the month interns begin their assignments...
...Underlying van Wolferen's critique of modern Japan is his assertion that the Japanese, unlike Westerners, do not hold "concepts of independent, universal truths or immutable religious beliefs transcending the worldly reality of social dictates and the decrees of power-holders . " There are enough differences between Western and Japanese behavior to make such an assertion credible...
...Here was one guy too busy with what was going on in the streets to be clinking cocktails after work with the rest of the embassy crowd...
...But the everincreasing expense of weapons technology combined with decreased funding makes choosing correctly all the more important...
...Edwin James was no smarter than anybody else," young Russell's mother would tell him again and again...
...A New York City grand jury agreed...
...And the smart guys always seemed to end up in Paris...
...Baker stretched the boundaries of he-said-she-said daily journalism to accommodate his quirky sensibility, but in those days not much stretching was allowed—especially at the starchy Times...
...The system has made them care less about their patients...
...Russell Baker's latest memoir takes him from apprenticeship as police reporter at the Baltimore Sun to elevation, at age 37, to New York Times columnist...
...Even today, expressions of dissent are tightly channeled and permitted only if they don't threaten the national interest...
...Their daughter was dead...
...The three young interns, Andy, Amy, and Mark, start their year full of apprehension and anxiety...
...The standard line, for example, about why Japan has so few lawyers—one for every 9,924 people, versus one for every 360 in the United States—and lawsuits is that the Japanese as a people are culturally disposed to avoid conflict and prize harmony...
...At Jutland the innovation was battleships...
...Unfortunately, so many people were now depositing and withdrawing on the account that when checks began to bounce, Snow realized that even she no longer had any clear idea of where all the money was going...
...Fifteen years ago, when Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was forced to resign in the wake of the Lockheed bribery scandal, he stayed in the Diet and went on to secure his status as the most powerful postwar Japanese politician, engineering the appointments of several of his successors...
...Even the life of the sarariiman ("salary man"), Japan's typical, blue-suited executive, has its equivalent in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit...
...John Keegan's books show that weapons aren't the only determinant of the outcome in warfare, that training, tactics, and preparedness matter as well...
...But it was the issue of compromised patient care that finally made the public take notice...
...Damage to the battlecruiser Seydlitz four months earlier had alerted German admirals to the danger of turret fire...
...As Amy recounts the story, the "urologist refused to come in...
...At Trafalgar the innovation was tactical...
...Even the Times now finds room on page one for "off-the-news" pieces exploring issues and personalities, and, inside, its uneven "Washington Talk" page demonstrates at least some commitment to doing the kind of government anthropology of which Baker was a master...
...Zion was convinced his daughter's death was due to mistakes made by inexperienced, overworked, and exhausted young doctors...
...Baker turns him into a marvelous caricature of all distant relatives whose undeserved good fortune brings endless grief...
...True, in the United States, politicians like Jim Wright and Tony Coelho have paid for their moneygrubbing with their political lives...
...His assertion, for example, that there are no strong leaders in Japan is somewhat belied by what he says about the powers of Kakuei Tanaka...
...Would that some of Washington's ex-officials had such scruples...
...Attention to turret safety is but one example...
...And as Keegan's chapter on the U-boat battles of the Atlantic amply demonstrates, submarine communication was a major problem in World War II...
...According to Keegan, until this episode sea battles resembled World War I land battles, with opposing fleets prizing position and ignoring maneuver, content to slug it out line against line...
...In one of his more horrible examples, a young boy who's had a kidney transplant comes down with complications requiring an operation on a Sunday...
...But as van Wolferen points out, "The judiciary and bar are kept artificially minuscule by strict controls over entry into the legal profession . " Confirmation can be found in van Wolferen's observation that in a recent year only 1.7 percent of Japanese law school-graduates passed their bar exam, compared to 74 percent of American ones...
...Status quo means defeat...
...He just refused to come...
...And today the U.S...
...Hence, van Wolferen asserts, they don't really believe in things like free markets and free trade, which introduce too many uncontrollable elements...
...While the future of Europe was being debated and duly recorded in London, Moscow, and Berlin, the stories were just as compelling at other spots around the globe...
...Political reporters were routinely lured away from the newsroom by politicians offering better pay...
...Four battles— Trafalgar, Jutland, Midway, and the Battle of the Atlantic—are examined in detail...
...Unworkable technology has long been the nemesis of efficiency in all military branches...
...Viking, $21.95...
...Although it has triggered widespread popular outrage, caused the arrest of 16 influential politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen, and forced the resignation of 44 officeholders—including Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita—it's unlikely to change the way Japanese money politics works...
...Of course, just as dependably, they'd find Personnel had something in mind along the lines of, "You take this post in Chad for now and we'll make sure you get something good later ." And after three years in Chad, sure enough, those same guys were on the boat to Burma...
...Only an order from the dying turret officer that the doors be shut and the magazines flooded saved the ship...
...Poor Fred Godsey...
...Baker's true rival for success in journalism was not Rosenthal (whose name doesn't even come up in The Good Times), but his mother's first cousin, Edwin James, who was managing editor of the Times...
...Witness the Bain & Co...
...There can be only a couple of explanations as to how Godsey got stung with off-beat locales so many times...
...Markgraf Publications, $28.95...
...Keegan points out that at the end of World War II even the best torpedoes were comparatively shortlegged and inaccurate...
...Finally wearying of "sitting on marble floors, waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me," Baker accepted an offer to write a column for the Sun...
...Baker is deeply skeptical of the status obsessions of both small-time and big-time journalism...
...Tell us what's going on in Burma...
...But mistakes are made...
...Like not a few conspiracy theories, van Wolferen's book ultimately undermines itself...
...Similarly, van Wolferen seems to go overboard when he cites as protectionist fervor a former government agriculture official's claim that he would find it inconceivable to lobby against the policies of his former ministry...
...The result is striking first-person evidence that the familiar arguments against the intern status quo are on the mark...
...The adaptation of technical advances to weaponry is a touchy business, one that must strike a balance between reliance on horse cavalry and a belief in silver bullets...
...Navy may be clinging to old ways...
...They issued recommendations for major changes in teaching hospitals...
...Marion never takes a firm stand on reforming the intern system...
...Ultimately, for all its strengths, what's disturbing about The Enigma of Japanese Power is that it presents important truths about Japan in a way that appeals to our worst instincts...
...Or the Air Force and Navy decision in the sixties to commit to a missile-only fighter even as Vietnam and Middle East experience was showing the necessity of guns in air warfare...
...But what makes his book especially valuable is that it consists of the yearlong journals of three new doctors who interned under him...
...In a more serious vein, Godsey chillingly relates the terrible days of the communist takeover of Hungary...
...Now that he's written about land warfare, naval battles, and military leadership, perhaps he'll turn to the most puzzling, inscrutable military subject of all—the Pentagon acquisition bureaucracy...
...What distinguishes van Wolferen's book from other broad-brush portraits of Japan Inc...
...Or Budapest...
...John Keegan...
...And darned if he wouldn't rather talk about bullfighting instead of getting an office with a window...
...is that it provides political rather than cultural explanations for Japanese behavior...
...Baker does a nice job lampooning the Anglophilia that was pervasive at the Sun (and remains common in American news organizations today...
...When Marion asks Andy how he's doing, he replies, "I can't talk to you, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to talk to you again...
...Van Wolferen, who wrote his book before Recruit hit the news, argues that the staying power of Japanese politicians and their general unresponsiveness to voters (as opposed to interest groups) makes the Japanese political system antidemocratic...
...And that's what this book is all about...
...Navy in recent months, by the gun explosion on the U.S.S...
...As you read A Gathering at the River—a collection of fiction stories rooted in Godsey's foreign service experience—it all starts to piece together...
...Some of his tales relate cultural misadventures, such as the story of the California religious order that undertook a goodwill mission to Burma...
...Another infamous Japanese practice van Wolferen deplores without picking up on the Western parallels is amakudari, or "descent from heaven," whereby senior bureaucrats retire to join firms they once helped to regulate...
...The Heavenly Tidings Mission almost landed in jail...
...Midway and the Battle of the Atlantic showed how quickly entirely new ways of waging naval war—aircraft carriers, submarines—could rise, threatening the supremacy of nations whose old salts cling to old ways...
...Marion includes many accounts of "attending" physicians (more experienced doctors who supervise interns and residents) who don't come to the hospital when called about a crisis...
...The Price of Admiralty takes the same approach...
...The gun-house crew perished instantly...
...he says that it "remains an unsolved weakness . " Keegan's strength as an author has always been his grasp of what actually happens in war, as opposed to what movie convention and War Ministry propaganda imply...
...Karel van Wolferen...
...Now the dwarves were overestimating how much they were going to spend because their projections were bound to get cut back...
...Out of Invincible's 1,000-man crew, only six survived...
...In desperation, she tallied up their combined income, made her best guess as to next year's income, and divided the total up among the dwarves...
...in the aftermath of World War II, it was still producing some news of genuine significance...
...The exercise leaves no illusion about the glories of combat, revealing it as a brutal and random business...
...Some guys never could get it right...
...Bing Semple The Intern Blues: The Private Ordeals of Three Young Doctors...
...And most programs require every third night "on call . " This means an intern works an entire day, straight through the night and on into the next day— about 36 hours—with rarely more than an hour or two of sleep along the way...
...At the end of their internships, Andy, Amy, and Mark all seem very confident and capable...
...After assuring the Zions that Libby would be fine, the intern and resident caring for her sent her parents home around 3:00 a.m...
...There is little doubt that the current intern system does teach doctors how to practice medicine...
...This hardening of the young doctor's soul is surely the cause of much that's (often lethally) wrong with the medical profession...
...The absence of a strong, accountable central authority enables the System to deflect not only internal calls for change but external ones as well...
...Returning stateside, Baker won another plum assignment—the White House...
...One thing the Japanese powers-that-be agree on is the need to preserve the status quo...
...Navy still clings to the big deck carrier, while, compared to the Soviet Union, the U.S...
...Having seen Keegan masterfully evoke Trafalgar, I would like to read his account of a Defense Resources Board meeting...
...As Andy cynically concludes, "The doctors who do the best with their own lives are the ones who don't talk to the families, who don't play with the children, who don't thoughtfully consider things . " For years critics have argued that internship is a pointless endurance test that turns idealistic young medical students into hardened cynics...
...I'm surprised I didn't read in his book that he kept getting unsolicited bottles of champagne from anonymous donors in the European division...
...As the British military author John Keegan points out in his well-reasoned new book, The Price of Admiralty, such damage and death didn't have to happen...
...The Urban Institute Press, $14.95...
...The names of the three interns, and just about everyone else, have been changed "to protect their identity" from, we presume, the wrath of the medical community...
Vol. 21 • July 1989 • No. 6
